The growth in women’s basketball viewership does not appear to be fading any time soon.
Monday’s WNBA Draft averaged 1.50 million viewers on ESPN, up 20% from last year (1.25M) and behind only 2024 — when Caitlin Clark was picked first overall (2.45M) — as the largest audience for the event. That is despite last year featuring a high-profile top pick in Paige Bueckers.
Viewership peaked at 1.79 million during the 7:45 PM ET quarter-hour, up 23% from last year’s peak of 1.46 million.
Between this year and last, Nielsen rolled out a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel — but that change would not fully explain an increase the size of 20%.
The increase for the draft comes on the heels of an NCAA women’s basketball national championship that — despite a lopsided result — increased 15% to nearly ten million viewers, the third-highest for the game in the Nielsen people meter era. (Keep in mind that game benefited from airing on Easter Sunday, which has become a potent day of sports viewership since Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates six years ago.)
The full NCAA women’s basketball tournament averaged 1.3 million viewers, up 5% from last year. Officially, that trails only 2024 as the highest for the tournament since it moved to ESPN, though it should be noted that the 5% increase is within the range that would be explained by Nielsen’s aforementioned methodological changes.
While it remains the case that women’s basketball draws its largest audiences when Caitlin Clark is involved, the sport is now sustaining the kind of viewership without her that would have once been considered pie-in-the-sky. Until 2024, the record for a WNBA Draft was 601,000 viewers in 2004. Now it has surpassed seven figures for three-straight years.
The WNBA Draft was the night’s top television program on any network among adults 18-34, a distinction that not long ago would have been implausible even for the highest-profile playoff and finals games — much less the draft. It now annually ranks third among pro sports drafts, behind the NFL and NBA, and comfortably ahead of Major League Baseball and the NHL.
